by Bruce Catton
Lincoln had said that if he did anything at all about slavery he would do it solely because he believed that it would help to win the war. Now the machine was stalling, and he had to get it moving again; and he had concluded that to do this he would have to call on the emotional power of the anti-slavery cause. The thoughts that would finally become the Emancipation Proclamation were taking shape in his mind when he visited McClellan; less than a week later, back in Washington, he would voice them to two members of his Cabinet. In the previous autumn he had rebuked Frémont for proclaiming abolition prematurely in Missouri; early this spring he had similarly rebuked General David Hunter for doing the same thing along the Carolina coast; now he was making up his mind to proclaim it himself … and the general of his principal army was telling him that the soldiers would not fight if he did.
Lincoln went back to Washington. Not long after, he called Halleck east and made him general-in-chief, in command of all the armies.
On form, the appointment looked good. The biggest gains had been made in the West — Missouri cleared, Kentucky saved, half of Tennessee in hand, armies of invasion poised in northern Mississippi and Alabama, with another army and a strong fleet in New Orleans — and all of this except the New Orleans business had been done by men under Halleck’s orders. The fact that a great chance had been missed on the slow crawl from Pittsburg Landing to Corinth was not yet apparent — not in Washington, anyway, although Grant and Ormsby Mitchel had been smoldering over it — and neither was the folly that had dispersed Grant’s and Buell’s armies and substituted the occupation of territory for a drive to destroy Rebel armies. In July 1862 the performance sheet made Halleck look like a winner, and so Halleck was summoned to Washington to take the top command.
It would take time for him to get oriented. This time would be a free gift to the Confederacy, which was led by men to whom it was dangerous to make gifts. And as a result this would be the summer of the great Confederate counterattack, with final Confederate independence looking more likely for a few brief haunted weeks than at any other time in all the war.
2. Cheers in the Starlight
Major General John Pope was an odd figure. Montgomery Blair once remarked venomously that he was a cheat and a liar like all the rest of his tribe, and while a disgruntled Blair was apt to be harsh in his judgments, Pope did have a pronounced ability to irritate people. He came on from the West exuding headstrong energy and loud bluster, and for a few weeks he held the center of the stage; then he evaporated, exiled to the western frontier to police the Indian tribes, leaving hard words and recriminations behind him. He had been given a comparatively minor part to play, and he almost succeeded in losing the war with it.
The War Department brought him east in a well-meant effort to get a little drive into the Virginia campaign, and it turned over to him some fifty thousand troops that were scattered all across northern Virginia and told him to weld them into an army and go down and fight Lee. Pope did his best, but the odds were all against him. It would have taken a good deal of time and some really inspired leadership to make a cohesive army out of the fragments that had been given him, and Pope did not have either.
To begin with, there was McDowell’s corps. These men, who had marched vainly back and forth across upper Virginia while the Army of the Potomac was fighting in front of Richmond, still considered themselves McClellan’s men. They did not like McDowell — for some incomprehensible reason they considered him disloyal to the Union cause — and they resented the orders that had held them away from McClellan’s command.
Next came the mountain army with which Frémont had vainly contemplated making a dash down into eastern Tennessee. About half of this corps was made up of German troops, and there was a noticeable lack of harmony between these and the native American regiments; the latter had not cared at all for Frémont, and when he was replaced by Franz Sigel, who had campaigned with varying success in Missouri, they liked Sigel no better. Their spirits were not improved when they learned that the rest of the army was lumping themselves and the Germans together, indiscriminately, as a Dutch outfit.
Lastly, there was the corps which Nathaniel P. Banks had led up and down the Shenandoah Valley. These men had never had any luck. Stonewall Jackson’s men had run rings around them and had seized their supply dumps and trains so consistently that jeering Rebels referred to Banks as their favorite commissary officer. The human material in this corps was good enough — which, for the matter of that, was true of the other two corps as well — but the men had never won anything so far and they seem to have been dismally aware that under Banks they were not likely to win anything in the future.
Pope tried to fit these three groups together into an army. To raise the men’s spirits he issued a spread-eagle proclamation, announcing that out West the Union armies were used to looking upon the backs of their enemies; he hoped that eastern armies would get the same habit, and from now on they would forget about defensive positions and lines of retreat and would devote themselves entirely to the attack. He was quoted as saying that his headquarters would be in the saddle, which led the irreverent to remark that he was putting his headquarters where his hindquarters ought to be, and instead of inspiring the men his impassioned words just made them laugh. In addition, Pope published harsh rules to govern the conduct of Rebel civilians within the Union lines, threatening wholesale imprisonments, executions, and confiscations. Nothing much ever actually came of these rules, but they did win for Pope a singular distinction: he became one of the few Federal generals for whom General Lee ever expressed an acute personal distaste. Lee remarked that Pope would have to be “suppressed” — as if he were a lawless disturber of the peace rather than an army commander — and he undertook to see to it personally, a fact that was to have extensive consequences.
Pope was moving down the line of the Orange and Alexandria Railroad, preparing to descend on Richmond from the northwest while McClellan’s presence on the James forced the city’s defenders to look toward the southeast. But Pope and McClellan were too far apart to co-operate effectively, and they were such completely dissimilar types that it is hard to imagine them working together anyway. McClellan remained in his camp, making no offensive gestures, and Lee presently concluded that it would be safe to send Stonewall Jackson up to look after Pope.
Jackson had not lived up to his reputation in the Seven Days’ fighting, but he seemed to be himself again now and he moved with vigor. Some word of his move got to Washington, which began to suspect that the Pope-McClellan operation was not going to work very well, and Halleck, the new generalissimo, went down to Harrison’s Landing to talk to McClellan. And now, once more, McClellan tripped over his wild overestimate of Confederate manpower.
It was essential to the present operation that McClellan move to attack Richmond. He could do this, he told Halleck, if he had thirty thousand more men. Halleck told him twenty thousand would be tops and asked if he could make the move with those reinforcements; McClellan said that he would try, although he was obviously dubious about it — for Lee, he assured Halleck, commanded two hundred thousand men.1
Halleck quickly reached what would seem to be a logical conclusion. If Lee’s army was bigger than Pope’s and McClellan’s combined — which was what McClellan’s estimate said — then it was obvious folly to let him occupy a position between them. There was only one thing to do: fuse these two Union armies into one and have them operate as a unit. To do this without uncovering Washington, it would be necessary to withdraw McClellan from the banks of the James. Early in August the orders went out. McClellan was to get his men north as quickly as possible so that he and Pope could join forces.
Bringing McClellan north was what really untied things. To get all of his men, guns, and equipment from the James to the upper Rappahannock and the Potomac would be a slow process. While it was being done the Army of the Potomac would be entirely out of action and the initiative would be with the Confederates. For some weeks to come they would be t
he ones who would be calling the signals.
They would be calling them in the West as well as in the East; indeed, during this summer the entire direction of the war would be in their hands, and the Confederate forces that had been doomed to an almost hopeless defensive in May were being given the chance to stage an all-out offensive in August. For Grant’s army was divided and immobilized, and Buell was painfully creeping along a shattered railway line, stitching it together as he went, and the Richmond government got reinforcements over into Mississippi from the region beyond the river, posted these where they could watch Grant’s men, and sent Beauregard’s old army swinging up through mid-Tennessee toward Kentucky in a hard counterblow that canceled all Federal strategic plans.
It was Beauregard’s army no longer. After his retreat from Corinth, Beauregard became ill and took leave of absence. He had never been able to get along with Jefferson Davis anyway, and Davis now replaced him, giving the army to scowling, black-bearded Braxton Bragg, who was always able to get along with Davis but who could hardly ever get along with anybody else.
Bragg was a fantastic character, as singular a mixture of solid competence and bewildering ineptitude as the war produced. He distrusted democracy, the volunteer system, and practically everything except the routine of the old regular army, and just before Shiloh he had complained that most of the Confederate soldiers had never fired a gun or done a day’s work in their lives. He was disputatious to a degree, and in the old army it was said that when he could not find anyone else to quarrel with he would quarrel with himself. A ferocious disciplinarian, he shot his own soldiers ruthlessly for violations of military law, and his army may have been the most rigidly controlled of any on either side.
This summer he was at the top of his form. He took his army off toward the east and then went up into Tennessee, smoothly by-passing Buell and heading straight for the Ohio River. In Kentucky, it was believed, the people would rise enthusiastically to welcome him, and he carried wagonloads of muskets to arm the recruits that were expected there. From eastern Tennessee a smaller Confederate army under Kirby Smith drove the Federals out of Cumberland Gap and moved north simultaneously. It would join up with Bragg’s men somewhere in Kentucky.
While this was going on — causing Buell to forget about Chattanooga and the railroad and to start backtracking feverishly in an effort to overtake Bragg — Lee in Virginia was devoting himself with deft persistence to the task of suppressing Pope.
Jackson had the first part to play. He struck Pope’s advance at Cedar Mountain a few days after McClellan had received his orders to evacuate Harrison’s Landing and head for the transports at Hampton Roads, and opened a furious attack. Pope’s advance was composed of Banks’s corps, and these men put up an unexpectedly stout fight, knocking Jackson’s men back on their heels and for an hour or so giving them a good deal more than they could handle. But Jackson had a huge advantage in numbers, and by dusk he had driven Banks’s corps off in rout with heavy loss. Pope’s main body came up next day, and Jackson drew off to wait for Lee and the rest of the Army of Northern Virginia.
He did not have long to wait, for McClellan’s departure freed Lee of concern for the James River area. Pope presently found himself up against the first team, and he was woefully outclassed. Lee quickly maneuvered him out of the triangle between the Rapidan and Rappahannock rivers and made him draw back; then, anxious to finish him off before McClellan’s men could come up and give Pope the advantage of numbers, Lee divided his army and sent Jackson off in a long sweep around Pope’s right flank, to strike at his supply base at Manassas Junction.
Jackson reached this base and destroyed it after a spectacular two-day march around and through the Bull Run Mountains. Utterly confused, Pope turned to strike him, fumbled in the attempt, and at last came upon him in a secure position overlooking the old Bull Run battlefield. And there, for two days at the end of August, Pope’s men fought a second battle of Bull Run — a bigger, harder, bloodier battle than the first, in which steady slugging replaced the stumbling retreats and panics of the first engagement, and in which General John Pope, from first to last, never quite knew what was going on.
Lee reunited his divided army on the field of battle, while Pope supposed that only Jackson’s corps was present. Mistaking a rearrangement of the Confederate lines for the beginning of a withdrawal, Pope exultantly telegraphed Washington that the Rebels were in retreat and that he would pursue them with horse, foot, and guns. Then, just as what Pope imagined to be his pursuit was getting under way, Lee struck him hard in the flank with James Longstreet’s thirty thousand veterans, and Pope’s army was broken and driven north across Bull Run in a state of confusion little better than the one that had been seen at the end of the first battle a year earlier. A good part of McClellan’s army had joined Pope just before the battle, but these men fared no better than Pope’s own soldiers; and as September began, the whole disorganized lot was withdrawing sullenly into the fortifications around Washington, and almost all of Virginia was back in Confederate hands.2
And here was a cruel end for all of the high hopes which the spring had created — Virginia lost, most of Tennessee lost, Bragg’s victorious army heading for the Ohio River and reclaiming Kentucky as it went, brushing aside the green Federal troops which midwestern governors were hastily sending down into that state, while Buell came plodding north in ineffective pursuit. Lee’s hard-fought soldiers went splashing across the Potomac fords, their bands playing “Maryland, My Maryland,” while Bragg openly made plans to inaugurate a Confederate governor in Kentucky’s capital city of Frankfort. And in Washington it seemed a question whether the demoralized men who had been whipped at Bull Run could possibly be pulled together into an effective army in time to accomplish anything whatever.
All of this came just as Abraham Lincoln was preparing to issue a proclamation of emancipation for Negro slaves.
He had made up his mind this summer. The base of the war would have to be broadened and an immeasurable new force would have to be injected into it. It would become now a social revolution, and there was no way to foretell the final consequences. At the very beginning Lincoln had accepted secession as a variety of revolution and had unhesitatingly used revolutionary measures to meet it, but he had clung tenaciously to the idea that the one ruling war aim was to restore the Union, and he had steered carefully away from steps that would destroy the whole social fabric of the South.
But it could not be done that way. The necessities of war were acting on him just as they acted upon the private soldier. To a correspondent, this summer, he was writing that he had never had a wish to touch the foundations of southern society or the rights of any southern man; yet there was a necessity on him to send armies into the South, and “it may as well be understood, once for all, that I shall not surrender this game leaving any available card unplayed.” To another correspondent he was writing that there was no sense to try “rounding the rough angles of the war”; the only remedy was to remove the cause for the war. To do this he would do everything that lay ready for his hand to do: “Would you drop the war where it is, or would you prosecute it in the future with elder-stalk squirts charged with rose water?”3
He would not use elder-stalk squirts. There was no way now to avoid the fundamental and astounding result. Come what might, Lincoln would free the slaves, as far as the stroke of a pen on a sheet of paper could accomplish that.
Yet he could not do it now. Secretary Seward, who had talked of a higher law and an irrepressible conflict long before the war began, was warning him: Issue your proclamation at this moment, when our armies have been beaten and we are in retreat all along the line, and it will look like nothing more than a cry for help — an appeal to the Negro slaves to rise and come to our rescue. You cannot issue it until you have somehow, somewhere, won a military victory.… Lincoln reflected on that matter and put his draft of the Emancipation Proclamation away in a cubbyhole in his desk. This war could not be turned into a revolutiona
ry war for freedom while it was in the process of being lost. Everything had to wait for victory.
A victory was needed for more reasons than one. Overseas, the British Government seemed to be on the verge of recognizing the Confederacy as an independent nation — an act that would almost certainly bring effects as far-reaching and decisive as French recognition of the American colonies had brought in 1778. Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, and Cabinet seemed at last ready to take the step. They would wait just a little while to see what came of Lee’s invasion of the North. Then, if all went well …
Then the wild impossible dream would come true, America would become two nations, and the outworn past with its beauty and its charm, its waste and its cruelty and its crippling limitations, would reach down into the future. Here was the crisis of the war, the great Confederate high-water mark. Never afterward was a final southern victory quite as close as it was in September 1862. The two halves of the war met here — the early formative half, when both the war and the change that would come from the war might still be limited and controlled, and the terrible latter half, which would grind on to its end without limits and without controls.
By one of the singular ironies in American history, the man who was standing precisely at this point of fusion — the man through whom, almost in spite of himself, the crisis would be resolved — was that cautious weigher of risks and gains, General McClellan.
McClellan had been quietly but effectively shelved. When his army came north it was fed down to Pope by bits and pieces, until by the final day of the Bull Run fight all of it was gone and McClellan was left isolated in Alexandria, across the river from Washington, a general without an army. He had not formally been removed from command, but his command had been most deftly slipped out from under him. The thing had been done deliberately. Secretary Stanton disliked and distrusted him, such men as Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase considered him no better than an outright traitor, and the Republican party leadership was almost mutinous against Lincoln for having supported him so long; and, anyway, it appeared that victory just was not in the man. He had been set aside, and the war would go on without him.